A few weeks ago a terrible story unfolded in a posh midtown Manhattan hotel where a 49-year-old mother, Gigi Jordan, was found “babbling and incoherent” beside the body of her eight-year-old son Jude, dead from an apparent overdose of ground up prescription pills, including Ambien and Xanax.  Later it was revealed Jude was autistic.

In his press conference, the stunned and shattered father, estranged from his ex-wife and son for the last two years, said he had no idea what provoked his ex-wife to kill their child.  “To be honest, she was the most wonderful mother I’ve ever seen. She left her business, left everything, just to take care of Jude.”  Her oldest friend, Dr. Marcus Conant said, “She went to clinics all over the country looking for new treatments, grasping at straws, trying to fix the problem.”

It’s almost too grim a scene to contemplate for long: The two of them alone in that room, her son dead for at least a day when the police broke in and found Jordan near death herself.  Even so, the media pile-up on her has been swift and decisive. Branded as a “Momster”, obsessed with perfection, unable to deal to with her son’s autism.  Across the internet, lurid posters can’t help but point out: she spent more time writing her twenty page suicide note than in successfully committing suicide.

The only group who has stayed surprisingly and almost universally silent on this story seems to be parents of autistic children.  As one myself, I suspect this isn’t because we sympathize exactly, or all secretly harbor dark fantasies of checking into posh hotel rooms and grinding Ambien tablets into applesauce to end our sad plights.   I don’t know anyone on the cusp of such a dangerous place, but I suspect the whole story evokes an image we recognize at least a little: a mother utterly alone with a child she can’t save. Or even seem to help. In a letter that rambled on incoherently by all accounts, Jordan made one message clear:  “He was in so much pain. I had to stop it.”

Every parent of an autistic child knows this is possible. Autism is accompanied by such a host of chronic gastrointestinal and immune system disorders that we all understand head banging is not a mysterious quirk of autistics. It’s a way to trade one pain for another. Normal measures of pain relief will tear up the stomach lining and exacerbate the problem which good doctors will both acknowledge and also admit, they have no answers for.

We know Jordan had been trying “experimental” therapies which sound a little fishy and new-agey, but as every parent of an autistic child will also tell you:  the only therapies we have now are experimental.  This explosion of autism began in the late eighties meaning most of the people diagnosed at this point are under the age of twenty-one.  There are no double-blind studies for them.  There’s anecdotal evidence and a lot of parents trying everything they can, feeling their way in the dark-diets, supplements, alternative therapies.

Jordan seems to have had an almost Sunny Von Bulow amount of money and just as little happiness or peace to go along with her fourteen properties around the world.  Clearly she had something akin to a psychotic break along the way, reporting her son as the victim of a satanic cult’s sexual abuse two years ago with no evidence, physical or otherwise.  The whole thing is a terrible cautionary tale, a reminder to all of us who’ve gotten through the darkest days of those early years with our children, who’ve made it to our child’s fifth birthday, then sixth then seventh and lain awake all night counting the milestones still unmet.  We all know that Jude’s age-eight-marks an emotional turning point for parents of autistic children. It’s the age (more or less) when the brain’s miraculous plasticity hardens.  A non-verbal child of eight will, in all likelihood remain so.  Eight is when you start modifying the future and setting more incremental, realistic goals.  Tying his shoes. Reading. Some measure of independence. Those things are possible. Cures are not. Eight is the time you stop putting your energy into fighting the autism that stole your child and start learning to enjoy the child autism has left you with.

It’s a trick, of course.  A learned skill like every skill you’ve drilled into your child.  But it’s there, for all of us. As the parent of a thirteen year old, decidedly unrecovered, I can say yes, having an autistic child means too often structuring vacations and outings around him. But I can also say oh, the surprising places we’ve gone!  The train museums and plane shows and exhibits of old radios just because the squeal of delight on my son’s face is worth the price of admission and a two-hour drive.

Recently I sat front row center for a touring show of Hairspray because, among Ethan’s countless mysterious passions, this show is one.  He saw an ad, fixated on it, and his generous grandmother bought us tickets. With any other child, I wouldn’t have let someone spend forty dollars a ticket to see a show which we already own on DVD.  What’s the point, right?  Then, after spending the first half worried that Ethan’s happy flapping and rocking was bothering other audience members, I turned around and saw the surprising number of his friends with disabilities, along with their sheepishly smiling parents, all of us here against all logic. Then it occurred to me. Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery: Hairspray is a celebration of every outsider struggling to find their place in the world.  With a fat girl front and center singing and dancing her heart out on behalf of marginalized groups (and they’re all there-blacks, SPED students, her thinly-veiled gay parents…) reminding us to be brave and do the same.  When the curtain call came and the star called out to the enormous audience “Come on Amherst, dance with us!” I fear our mostly sweater-vested, bespectacled crowd didn’t quite know what to do.  We sat awkwardly as academics always will. Then—in one of those magical moments that only happen in live theater—we all watched, stunned, as our grown children jumped up and one by one started to dance.  All of them did it, flapping ecstatically up and down the aisle.  One girl with Down Syndrome found a spot to do somersaults.  Another boy tried to take off his shirt.

Afterward, while Ethan crawled over the floor to stuff his pockets with bits of confetti left over from the final number, I laughed with the other parents over our children’s euphoria, and I thought: Here is the reward for the lonely years.  Here we all are, at a show where we can learn something about joy from our kids.

This might be what Gigi Jordan never found and what parents of newly diagnosed children should remember. Number One:  Don’t go it alone.  Find other parents and share your journey as openly and honestly as possible. Number Two:  Wherever your child ends up on the spectrum from low to high functioning, there will be happy moments. Obsessions to join them on, some interesting, some less so.  But most important, there is joy to be had, good times ahead, and a zillion bits of confetti to sweep up with your hands and stuff in your pockets so you can remember it later, when you don’t have the words to describe it exactly.

Photo from The Daily News